WaterAid Canada

Fighting global poverty through access to clean water and sanitation.

WaterAid Canada is a member of WaterAid, the world’s largest international non-profit dedicated exclusively to helping the world’s poorest people gain long-term access to safe drinking water, toilets and effective hygiene education.

At 6:00 am my alarm goes off and I step out of bed to walk to my bathroom sink and splash my face with some warm, clean water. By 6:30 I fill a pot with water for my morning coffee. I squeeze a fresh...

While midwives in modern hospitals fill birthing pools without a thought and benefit from stringent hygiene protocols, those in many areas of the developing world may start their day with a struggle to find enough water to clean floors and bedlinens, wash their hands and offer labouring women a drink.

The song was being sung in Malagasy, Madagascar's national language. I kept hearing the word 'mama' repeated, so I immediately ran to our translator and asked her what they were singing. She said they were singing a traditional song, a song about their mothers. It all felt so surreal. Time was moving slowly.

The truth is, extreme weather events that cause flooding, prolonged drought and contaminated water sources are becoming far more frequent. In 2016, global temperatures reached a record high for the third year in a row, and reports of extreme weather events continued to come in from around the world.

But India is seemingly entering a golden age of sanitation. Airwaves and public spaces across the country are inundated with messages urging everyone to keep their surroundings clean, build toilets and help end open defecation. Governments across the country are on a mission to build millions of toilets to make India open defecation free by 2019.

Access to water and toilets is transformative. It opens doors to education, health, nutrition and to a better livelihood. Access to water and toilets offers women and girls so many more opportunities to contribute their fullest to their communities.

As cities expand the numbers of urbanites living without basic sanitation has swelled by 26 million since the year 2000. An estimated 100 million of these have no choice but to defecate in the open -- using roadsides, railway tracks and even plastic bags dubbed 'flying toilets'. Our report exposes several countries for failing to make progress in providing urban sanitation, despite rapid economic growth.

Safe drinking water and decent toilets should be basic essentials in every school, everywhere. Unfortunately, it's not the case for millions of children in the world. Take the 500 students at St. John Bosco Gayaza Primary School in Uganda for example. The water source they rely on is an open pool located about one kilometre from their school.